Any designs for a small antenna to work on 160M? My garden is approx 40ft
x
17ft.
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Hi, M3,

The following set-up will work okay. Been there, done that. Height is the
critical dimension. It will be about 2 S-units worse than ideal.

Inverted-L antenna. Vertical section = 40 feet. Put a pole on house
chimney to increase height. Horizontal section 40 feet. You can extend
length at far end by making it an Inverted-U.

A sytem of ground radials is essential. 8, 12, 16 shallow-buried radial
wires at least 25 or 30 feet long in ordinary, damp garden soil.
Important - connect the domestic plumbing pipes and incoming water main to
the ground radial system.

A tuner is essential. The average commercial tuner will NOT cope. You will
need a home brew tuner. Wind some tapped coils on toilet roll tubes using
20 or 22 gauge wire. Inductance values up to 100 uH. See program SOLNOID3.

Tuning capacitor = 500 pF maximum, 750 volts working, not particularly wide
spaced plates. A LARGE old-fashioned receiving-type capacitor would be OK.
Also obtain a few fixed-value, mica capacitors. Be prepared to experiment
with tuning capacitor and coil values.

If you like playing with a few numbers, download in a few seconds program
ENDFEED from website below and run immediately. This program computes
performance and also provides values of T-match and L-match components for
given antenna wire dimensions.

160 meters, 50 miles groundwave in daylight with 100 watts. Transatlantic
on CW, if you try hard, on long, very quiet, winter nights.

It will be also be usable at high efficiency on higher frequency bands. For
practical purposes, taking one band with another, it will be
omni-directional.

Get program ENDFEED from -
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Regards from Reg, G4FGQ
For Free Radio Design Software go to
http://www.btinternet.com/~g4fgq.regp
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